“Why would I buy you a thing when I can buy you an adventure instead?” read my Christmas gift to Jamie this year. Groupon had convinced me that a 90-minute trapeze class for two in Escondido was a great investment (of course I was the other person invited to the class, that’s an unwritten rule anytime you give someone a gift “for two”). When we finally redeemed it, we had no idea what we had gotten ourselves in to.

This is the face Jamie gave me as we pulled up to what looked like an abandoned house in the backcountry of Escondido one Sunday afternoon in January.

I couldn’t blame her when she pulled me aside and whispered, “What have you done?!” in hushed urgency. I saw her point: Here we are in a random backyard filled with beams, trapeeze swings, gymnastics rings, slack lines and every kind of net and bar you would find in a gymnastics class, about to have a 55-year-old man with a cowboy hat and blue fingernails teach us how to fly through the air.

One thing you have to understand; it’s not like either Jamie or I to back down from a challenge, especially an athletic one. So when Dave showed us once how to swing from the dangling rings one arm at a time like Tarzan and Jane, we gulped and did it. When he took us over to the rings a few feet higher off the ground, we gulped and did it. When he took us to the ladder and told us to climb up to the trapeze launch deck, we gulped and did it. Note: I later found out Jamie has an extreme fear of heights, which I had not known prior to this adventure. Oops.

So there we stood at the top of a trapeze platform. In case you don’t know, in order to take off on a trapeze you have to put your feet at the edge of the platform and lean your center of gravity out over your toes while one hand holds on to a bar behind you and one hand grabs the trapeze. And you’re 30 feet off the ground. Below us laid a net overtop of a massive inflated air bed.

Did we have a harness on? Yes. Was it attached to anything at all? No.

I look over at Jamie and I see that I’m not the only one terrified. I’m laughing it off but it’s that nervous laugh that you succumb to when your body doesn’t know how to physically handle a situation so far outside your comfort zone.

“Ha-ha! I’m terrified!” I shout at Jamie.

I was extremely sweaty and to compensate, I put an excessive amount of chalk on my hands.* Dave motioned me up first and on try #5, I finally shifted my weight forward enough. I didn’t think I could get any more petrified. I wasn’t attached to anything. I was about to dangle by my hands and fly through the air. Nothing in my life had ever prepared me for this, and yet here I was with no one to blame but myself and freaking Groupon.

Dave counts me down and before I know it, my feet have left the platform and my hands are hanging on to this bar for dear life. Per Dave’s directions, I don’t take my eyes off my hands until I hear him shout, “LET GO!”

Then I’m falling, falling, falling through the air. Poof. I land on the pool-sized airbag. I’m still alive. I roll over and look up. “WOOHOO!”

Jamie’s next.

She goes through the same petrified motions and falls through the air.

Poof.

Woohoo!

Now it gets more fun. Jamie and I repeat the process several times. While it doesn’t get any less scary, with each swing we gain more confidence in ourselves. By the end, we’re swinging by our knees and doing flips off the bar onto the airbag.

Walking out of that jungle-gym of a backyard two hours later, Jamie and I felt mentally and physically exhausted.

With raw hands we drove home, recapping our roller coaster of emotions from the afternoon. It’s not often you feel excited, anxious, terrified, proud and victorious all in one afternoon, but today we did and it felt so, so good. We forced ourselves to do something we had never done before and we were successful. Something that really put us to the test, and we accomplished more than we knew we could. I mean, flips? On our first day? Sans harness?! Yeah, we were proud.

So Groupon, if you’re reading this, I’m not mad at you anymore. I was at first, but definitely not anymore.

*Author’s note: I’m literally getting sweaty writing this post right now. This is not a joke.